Dean Sean Kelly's message for the Winter Newsletter 2025
Dear Friends,
When the sixteenth century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne wrote that “we reach the same end by divergent means,” he meant that the mysterious human capacity to bring others around to our point of view – to, as Montaigne would say, “turn the heart of another” – this essentially human but also essentially enigmatic power, is more Art than Science. That crucial lesson of the human heart lies at the core of what we do in the arts and humanities. I believe it is more important now than ever. I will get to some of the details of our present moment towards the end of this message. But I hope you will indulge me, first, in a brief consideration of Montaigne’s claim. I believe it tells us something important about what the arts and humanities are, and why they are so crucial now.
Like all of us, Michel de Montaigne was the product of his upbringing. His, however, was more unusual than most. Among other things Montaigne’s father, in a choice that ranks him as perhaps one of the first exemplars of the “helicopter parent,” decided early on that Latin would be his eldest son’s native tongue. In an age when figures like Luther and Coverdale devoted themselves to the presentation of the bible in the vernacular, Montaigne’s father determined instead that nobody within earshot of his young son would converse in any language other than that of Virgil and Cicero. This was not the only peculiarity of Montaigne’s upbringing. By the age of six, he is said to have been able to read classical Greek fluently; by his late adolescence, the stories go, he had read almost all, and had memorized large portions, of the existing classical Greek and Latin corpus. This strange childhood stocked Montaigne’s mind with a huge reserve of stories – a treasure trove, effectively, of historical and sociological data about the passions, motivations, ambitions, and faults of human existence. He drew upon this storehouse of examples throughout his lifelong exploration of the human spirit.
In his famous essay about the heart of another, which often opens the complete, edited collection of Montaigne’s works, the philosopher argues by example. He presents a range of stories from classical literature in which two individuals, engaged in battle, have reached the stage at which one has clearly bested the other. In accordance with the standards of the time, the defeated warrior must attempt to persuade the enemy to spare his life. That is the “end” (le but) to which the warrior is now aspiring. What Montaigne notices however, across his great range of cases, is that there is no algorithm for bringing about this end. Indeed, the very argument that in one case wins the day, in some other leads to inexorable defeat. When one figure begs for his life on the grounds that he has a wife and children depending upon him at home, it sometimes melts the heart of the aggressor and brings him to spare the life of his defeated foe. But in another case, similar in every relevant respect, the warrior finds this posture so pathetic that immediately he is driven to execute his opponent. So too, for the many other tactics that Montaigne describes. If our task in life, and especially in some of the most critical moments of our lives, is to turn the heart of another – to bring them over to our point of view – then alas, Montaigne concludes, there is no certain recipe for success.
Two generations later, Montaigne’s successor in the French pantheon, Blaise Pascal, describes the issue from the opposite point of view. The question for Pascal is not how to turn the heart of another, but how to allow for the possibility that one’s own heart might be turned. Specifically, Pascal wants to know the process by means of which one can be moved from the posture of a non-believer to that of one graced by genuine belief in the Christian God. Pascal imagines a postulant every bit as eager as Montaigne’s warrior: he desires more than anything that his heart be turned towards God. But what method will manage to do the trick? The method that one might have imagined would work – the method, indeed, that is advocated to great historical effect by René Descartes, that monumental rationalist French philosopher squeezed into the generation between these two deep explorers of the human heart – is the method of argument. Surely, if there were a valid and sound argument to the conclusion that God exists, then the non-believer would simply have to believe. Alas, says Pascal, such an argument would be to no avail. Consider Anselm’s famous ontological argument for the existence of God, for example. Even if one could hold all the premises together in one’s mind, Pascal says, and even if we could convince ourselves that the steps lead inexorably from those premises to their conclusion, a human being would not through that method be turned into a person of the Christian faith. Genuine belief, according to Pascal, belief that is held in the heart of one who has been turned, is not achieved by the cheap trick of argument. Its source is somehow much more mysterious.
The evidence that Pascal is right about this – at least for matters of deep human significance – comes from the famous atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell. As a student at Cambridge in the late 19th century, Russell tells us in his autobiography, he once thought he had convinced himself that Anselm’s argument was correct. Crossing the green of his college one day, he suddenly found himself throwing his tin of tobacco high into the air and exclaiming “Great God in boots! The ontological argument is sound!” Far from making him a Christian believer, however, this only convinced Russell that he must figure out precisely where his addled reasoning had led him astray. Arguably, Russell’s eventual embrace of the existential quantifier – which is one way of precisifying Kant’s intuition that Anselm went astray by treating existence as a predicate – was motivated by that experience crossing the green.
Pascal was different from Montaigne in almost every way: he was a believer instead of a skeptic; he was a mathematician/scientist instead of a humanist through and through. To the extent that Pascal knows the stories of classical antiquity, it seems to be mostly because he read them in his copy of Montaigne. But despite these differences, Pascal agrees with Montaigne that there is no algorithm for turning the heart. It is a human process, and perhaps even an extra-human process, whose mystery goes beyond what we can hope to control or direct. That does not mean we have nothing to do with what we or others will come to believe. We engage in conversation, we expose ourselves to the views of others, we care about what we ought to believe, in the hopes that our lives may be thereby enriched. But we do not control this process. If there is, therefore, any deep significance in our current pursuit of intellectual vitality, as I believe there is, then it must recognize the importance of differing points of view, perhaps even irreconcilable points of view, that cannot be turned to agreement through the mere force of argument. Perhaps mathematicians can approach the domain of mathematics with that ambition. But the domain of the human heart, and the human spirit, must have deeper sympathy and deeper hope for those with whom we disagree.
It can be hard to focus on these humanistic virtues in a world where our model for thinking has come to concentrate on generative AI. This is the other dimension of our current environment that impinges upon, even if only as a simulacrum, the genuine ambitions of the human heart. Still, I think there is an opportunity here. I have been using the Harvard AI Sandbox a lot recently. I encourage you to try it out as well. There are ways in which I think it could be a useful tool. If I want to understand better, for instance, (as I do!) why the great 15th century Italian humanist Marcilio Ficino turned with such avidity to the study of neo-Platonism, then it helps to know what texts specifically he was reading and translating, and to be able to ask about some of the scholarly arguments regarding what he found interesting in them. Claude, the AI assistant from Anthropic whom I have been chatting with, is pretty good at giving me the lay of the land. Likewise, if I want to know (as I do!) why the great 15th century printer Aldus Manutius was driven to publish the bizarre and fascinating text called Poliphilo’s Dream of the Struggle of Love (Hypnerotomachia Poliphili), I can ask Claude all sorts of questions about what else Manutius was publishing at the time, who he was selling his books to, what the conversations about them were like, and most importantly, which scholars have written the most highly regarded books and papers about those issues. This is all terrific information to have in engaging this period of intellectual history. But information is a precursor to, not the end of, humanistic inquiry. T.S. Eliot made this distinction already almost a hundred years ago: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?” he wrote. “Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” For all its capacity to summarize bits of information, Claude has no human perspective from which it is speaking, nor any heart that could aim to turn or be turned. It is a tool, and we must learn to use it well. But we must use it to deepen what we do, not to replace it. The question how we should do that is an essential question for the human project, and therefore an essential question for the humanities. Keep an eye out for an invitation to several conversations I’ll be hosting this semester about this very question. Meanwhile, for an intriguing exercise in preparation, consider the summary of this very message that I have asked Claude to generate.
Artists and humanists hold before themselves the question what the arts and humanities are. For questioning, as it has been said, is the piety of thinking. Still, the significance of any question changes with the historical moment in which it is engaged. It is no secret that the moment we are living in is chaotic. Executive orders are dropping with abandon, and some of them may eventually impact some aspects of what we do. We are quickly getting up to speed on a variety of issues. I wrote to the chairs of A&H departments on Friday with guidance about requests from law enforcement (including ICE) for non-public access to our campus. You have also heard regularly from John Shaw, our Vice Provost for Research, about issues related to federal research funding. And I met personally, a few days ago, with departmental liaisons to talk about the crucial importance of difference to the essentially interpretive work we do in our division. Still, the overall effect of the federal government’s actions with respect to universities in general, and to Harvard in particular, remains unclear. I am comforted to know, as I hope you are, that there are offices in the University working 24/7 to help us navigate the legal and financial travails that we may confront. If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to reach out to my office, and we will put you in touch with the experts who can help.
Without minimizing the chaos of our moment, however, we must not let it divert us from the significance of what we do. The mission of Harvard, and especially the mission of the arts and humanities at Harvard, lies in our pursuit of knowledge and understanding, in our teaching and scholarship, and in the care, sympathy, and intelligence with which we engage the human project. If we keep our mission as artists and humanists in mind, if we remember the true ambitions of our creative and critical work, then that is how we will prevail. You will have your own examples to ground you in this mission. But for me, the mystery of Abraham’s response to God’s command to sacrifice his son, or the twinkling of an eye in which Saul’s heart was turned on the road to Damascus, or the astonishing instant in which Dante’s life was turned by the love he felt for Beatrice, or the nuance, subtlety, and ambiguity of Elizabeth’s ongoing relations with Mr. Darcy – these are some of the many examples that motivate my certainty that what we do in the arts and humanities deepens and makes more significant the lives we lead. I am comforted by the thought that it takes no expensive lab or fancy apparatus to ponder these cases. It only takes sympathy, care, and intelligence – virtues that I know all of you have in abundance. The fact that our work can be done everywhere from prisons to palaces, that Boethius and Martin Luther King could turn our hearts every bit as much as Descartes and Princess Elizabeth, gives me hope that no matter what our circumstances, we will prevail. I look forward to sharing that project with all of you!
Yours truly,
Sean
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Sean D. Kelly
Dean of Arts and Humanities
Teresa G. and Ferdinand F. Martignetti Professor of Philosophy